Yotel! to bring spaceship Japanese hotels to London

Yotel! will provide accommodation that is a modelled on a Japanese "capsule" hotel which offers "box-size" rooms. There will, however, be significant differences to make an overnight stay more comfortable than for those who stay in the Japanese hotels.

Each Yotel! will have more than 100 rooms, each just seven by eight feet and seven feet high, with a communal bar and lounge. The hotel, which will hire rooms by the hour, is the idea of Simon Woodroffe, who launched the Yo! Sushi restaurant chain in Britain five years ago.

He asked the designers of British Airways reclining first-class sleeper beds to come up with a prototype.

The chain will offer a 24-hour check-in with rooms costing from £50 for an overnight stay. It will be aimed at people "with attitude" particularly young business travellers who are on a restricted expenses budget. The design of the rooms, revealed for the first time today by The Telegraph, has just been completed after more than 150 development drawings.

There will be an intercom system to reception and internet access. Premium, as opposed to standard, rooms will also have a working area. Every room will have a separate en suite bathroom of six feet by three which will have a shower with a digitally controlled temperature system. The rooms will be made from aluminium, fibre-glass and dense plastic.

Woodroffe first came up with the idea of launching a hotel chain four years ago, but he did not think that Japanese capsule hotels would work in Britain without variations.

Capsule hotels are popular in Japan among businessmen looking for a last-minute place to stay, but with "rooms" less than three feet high they have been likened to hiring a coffin to sleep in for the night. Woodroffe felt that British customers would not tolerate spending the night in such a confined space where they could not stand up.

"I was looking at the whole idea of hotels with very small rooms when I was lucky enough to be upgraded to a first class seat on a British Airways flight to the Middle East," he said. "I thought: 'This is it'. We should mix the concept of a capsule hotel with British Airways first class. I decided to track down the guy who had designed the reclining bed in the sky."

For the past year, Woodroffe has worked with Russell Mulchansingh and Stuart Banham, from Opius, the London design company, to come up with a prototype for the rooms. "The end result is the feeling of travelling first class on an aeroplane but in a tiny room," said Woodroffe, who has yet to decide on the exact site in London for the first hotel.

"We want people's stay at Yotel! to be experiential. If people have a good experience they will come back and have that experience again. With some budget hotel chains you get a big room but you get treated like a travelling salesman.

"We will give people a very small room, which will feel as if they were in a spaceship, but they will be treated in the same way as business or first class on an airline. We consider the rooms are as well designed as the inside of a Mercedes motorcar."

Woodroffe launched the Yo! brand in 1997 with his life savings of £150,000. He has since expanded into fashion, music, spas, books and, now, hotels. Provided the launch hotel is a success, other hotels will open at cities and airports throughout the country.

There are also plans to open hotels abroad, initially in New York and Paris.